If you look at the practical applications of robotics, the vast majority of robots that you see today are in factories doing high precision, high-speed work, such as sticking, placing, grinding, deburring, painting, that sort of thing. The first generation robots are extremely good for a lot of things, but they’re not very aware of their environments; they’re not adapted to work around humans. They’re in cages, where they’re separated from humans, and they’re extremely expensive in terms of both the robots and the support equipment around them.
The new generation of robotics is riding a lot of trends, such as Moore’s Law, so we can put more intelligence on the robot itself. The costs of computation and sensors are coming down. There’s this whole movement around collaborative robotics with robots that are very easily taught, very cheap, and very able to work closely with humans, while employing new technology, such as SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) for autonomous vehicles and similar applications.
